The Printing Stewards

A short tour of the five main machines we will be working on. Stewards Casting Diary 1.5: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Our workspace tour video is now available on YouTube! youtu.be/YdxOL5cm-Ik This short video gives you a tour of the work space we've created over several cleaning work sessions. Meet the five casters (of the 46 in the collection) that we will be working on in the near term.

To really give you a sense of the progress we have made at the foundry, I have posted a short tour of our work area on Patreon. We've got five machines on deck, and the space around them to do our work.

www.patreon.com/posts/stewar...

PS Machine No. 57: The American Type Founders Barth Caster, 72pt Mold, ATF Machine 149

PS Machine No. 71: The American Type Founders Barth Caster, 14pt Mold, ATF Machine 233

PS Machine No. 48: The American Type Founders Giant Pivotal

We have 16 casters from ATF, and 3 are on a clear restoration track. This Saturday we cleared even more space around the machines so that we can actively work on them. I just sent a project management email this morning to establish our repair timelines. $3/month helps all this happen faster.

Black bookmark with copper ink that says “Read Trans Authors”

Poster with pink ink that says “Trans Kids are Worthy”

Posters that read Trans Kids Are… Loved, Real, Slay!, A Vibe, strong, complex, worthy, cool!

We agree with every single one of these!!

Letterpress printed sheets reading TRANS KIDS ARE REAL TRANS KIDS ARE SPECIAL TRANS KIDS ARE LOVED

Dropped by @skeuomorphpress.org to check on @transbookhistory.bsky.social’s community print for Trans Day of Visibility & found it bustling, full of kids & families happily setting wood type & printing these incredible broadsides. If we founded Skeuomorph for anything it was for events like that

Adding this to my very short list of things I’m most proud of during my graduate career. It was exactly what I needed during these difficult times and I could tell it was what they all needed too!

New acquisition inspired by @literaturegeek.bsky.social. I just couldn’t resist! Had to have it!

OMG!

Forward! | The Printing Stewards Get more from The Printing Stewards on Patreon

We had a great work session on Saturday! Join us on Patreon and learn about all of the progress we have made preserving and restoring historic typographic machinery, including some of the last remaining machines from the American Type Founders.

www.patreon.com/posts/forwar...

Forward! | The Printing Stewards Get more from The Printing Stewards on Patreon

My non-profit, @printingstewards.bsky.social , had another work session on Saturday. Join our Patreon and learn how we are saving historic typographic machines.

www.patreon.com/posts/forwar...

This suggests to me that the insert was produced by some other entity that makes deals for their stuff to be included in newspapers? I can't wait for the part where we find out what the hell happened.
bsky.app/profile/elec...

This is the end result of the Sun-Times gutting its arts and entertainment staff through layoffs and attrition

Trying to get my head round how this could make it to print. Many warning signs for all of us

Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist "I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses," the writer said. "I'm completely embarrassed."

404 Media got to the bottom of it! www.404media.co/chicago-sun-...

This is exactly what I mean when I say that it is impossible to reduce friction, only to move it around.

The text-making-up machine dropped the friction of "research" to zero, but every single person downstream of that "research" who has to act upon it now shoulders a double workload.

I just feel an overwhelming sense of sadness this morning over this? There are thousands of struggling writers out there who could write a brilliant summer reads feature and should be paid to do so. Pay humans to do things for fuck's sake.

Robert Preston flirts with a reluctant Shirley Jones over a dictionary in the River City Library, in 1962's THE MUSIC MAN

Funnily enough, I was just talking to someone who is researching his book in the library. We agreed that one day, AI might trash-ify the internet to the point that anyone doing any research will be back at the library, leafing through paper books like the good lord intended.

"Honey, could you give this a once-over before we print it with our name on it?"

me (I'm Honey), approx. 20 seconds later: "That first book doesn't exist. You want me to read the rest, or is it time to just trash the whole thing?"

But our baseline mission is to keep skills alive, and to celebrate skills themselves as expressions of humanity. We want to maintain human capacity through skill preservation. And that's what I want of my writing students. I want them to develop their own ideas, so they can maintain that capacity.

The tools we preserve, which made metal type, likewise erased older skills while creating newer ones. The printing revolution itself created and erased skills in that same way. AI is the direct lineal descendant of metal type and the print shop. This is not an easy story with clear villains.

AI tools are complicated. They are not uniform in their character. But at this moment as we incorporate them into our work, we risk injuring ourselves when we misunderstand what we are, what skills are, and what the AI is doing for and to us. I am going to continue to think on this.

A skill is mapped physically in the brain. The brain IS the network of skill maps you have embedded in it. Every skill that has ever existed is part of the great corpus of ways in which we have been human. We are a skills platform, beings made of skills. Every time we de-skill, we lose something.

I (Fritz Swanson) am sharing this from this account because we are an organization dedicated to skill preservation. We don't preserve objects alone, but instead we wrap the objects in what Scott Russell Sanders called the "double inheritance" of a tool, it's "cloud of knowing".

Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist "I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses," the writer said. "I'm completely embarrassed."

I spoke to the person who AI-generated the Chicago Sun-Times reading list. Says he's very embarrassed. This was part of a generic package inserted into newspapers and other publications, so likely to run elsewhere. He didn't know it'd be in Chicago Sun-Times

www.404media.co/chicago-sun-...

YouTube video by The Printing Stewards Stewards Casting Diary One

The machines are coming alive! Here is the first casting diary. Hopefully one of many. Spoiler, it did not kill me. But, I think most of our videos could go under this title. In this video we cast 144pt type! The largest in the world! And we learn what needs to be fixed.

youtu.be/KAv3mX0CLRA

Ah, thanks for the clarification. I appreciate your expertise.

Sponsored inserts are a long-standing revenue vehicle for newspapers. They are printed by the advertiser and sent to the newspaper's printer for collation into the issue. The newspaper doesn't exercise editorial control. And yes, they can go into multiple publications as part of a campaign.

YouTube video by The Printing Stewards Stewards Casting Diary One

The machines are coming alive! Here is the first casting diary. Hopefully one of many. Spoiler, it did not kill me. But, I think most of our videos could go under this title. In this video we cast 144pt type! The largest in the world! And we learn what needs to be fixed.

youtu.be/KAv3mX0CLRA